Former Black Panthers share stories with U.
http://www.dailytargum.com/news/former-black-panthers-share-stories-with-u-1.2411916
November 19, 2010
Say the word "panther" and some may think of a large cat, others may
think of the Carolina football team and for others, the word may
evoke the memory of Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton and a revolutionary
movement that changed America's history in the 1960s.
Hundreds of people attended "Original Black Panthers Speak," a
discussion with former Black Panthers Emory Douglas and Billy
Jennings, and learned more about the latter definition last night in
the crowded conference rooms of Brower Commons on the College Avenue campus.
Douglas, revolutionary artist of the Black Panther Party and later
its Minister of Culture, designed many aspects of the party's
newspaper. Jennings, who worked with both co-founders, Newton and
Seale, created publications for the It's About Time Committee, which
aims to preserve the party's legacy and offer information about
social justice issues.
The event was sponsored by the Center for Historical Analysis and the
Department of History at the University.
"To become a Panther is to really work hard," Jennings said. "Besides
having to deal with the police department and different agencies of
the government trying to shut us down, trying to raid our office,
trying to belittle us, the Black Panther Party, to me, is one of the
greatest organizations in American history during that time."
Jennings, who joined the party at age 17 just a week after graduating
from high school, said he was inspired to get involved with the party
because of its ideals and sense of camaraderie.
"What really got me interested in the party was the 10-point
program," he said. "It wasn't the guns or anything, because I was
born in the South. When you're born in the South, you grow up with guns."
After reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" and hearing the
messages of Seale and Eldridge Cleaver when he moved to Oakland,
Calif., Jennings wanted to become a Panther himself, a process he
said took dedication.
"You just couldn't walk into the organization and say, 'I want to be
a Panther,'" he said. "There was a six-week training period."
While training to become a part of the party, Jennings learned much
about political issues and the party's viewpoint on them.
"I had never heard the word 'imperialism' before I joined the Black
Panther Party," he said. "That was one of the words the Black Panther
Party introduced to the community."
The party ran schools, organized programs to distribute free meals
and ran clinics two of which still exist to help the sick,
regardless of their ability to fund care, factors Jennings said drew
him to the organization.
"We merged nutrition and education together," he said. "No one had
done that before."
Jennings said that while the country was at war in Vietnam, there
were issues of injustice that needed to be addressed right at home.
"There certainly wasn't any freedom here," he said. "We [didn't
believe] that we should go fight for this country and there wasn't
any freedom here. You could wear the uniform in Vietnam, but when you
came back to America, bad things might happen to you."
Following Jennings' talk, Douglas presented a slide show of artwork
he drew in the '60s and '70s, as well as pieces he did more recently.
"This artwork is not 'me' art, it's 'we' art. It came out of the
struggle and the politics at that time," Douglas said. "It just
happened that I was the one who interpreted a lot of it during that period."
Drawings of the party's symbol, a black panther, helped mobilize
illiterate black voters, he said.
"The panther became the symbol when blacks in the rural south went to
the place to vote, they knew to vote for the black panther," Douglas said.
Many of Douglas' pieces portrayed policemen and other agents who
oppressed blacks as pigs, an expression of blacks' animosity toward
authority at the time.
"This is how we began to define the police at that particular time,"
Douglas said. "There were a lot of rebellions, a lot of riots in the
'60s. Black people [were] being abused by the police when they came
into the community, particularly young black men [were] shot."
Like Jennings, Douglas expressed the idea that the battles at the
time should have been fought domestically, not overseas.
"The Vietnamese weren't calling us a cause of unemployment. The
Vietnamese weren't a cause of inferior education. … The Vietnamese
weren't calling us 'nigger,'" he said. "So our fight was not in Vietnam."
Panthers continue to influence today's world, Douglas said.
"A lot of people don't know that the only race [President] Barack
Obama ever lost was against a Black Panther," he said. "[U.S. Rep.]
Bobby Rush was a Black Panther."
There are several issues the Panthers fought against that continue to
afflict the black community, Douglas said.
"If you've been convicted of a crime, you can be subjected to
slavery," he said. "That's on the books."
Black Men's Collective President Quadeer Porter said he, as a black
leader on campus, was inspired by the party's perseverance in the
face of adversity and enjoyed the event overall.
"Huey Newton talked about how the capitalistic society was pretty
much taking over America, and things need to happen," said Porter, a
School of Arts and Sciences junior. "This pretty much solidified his
ideologies, and everything that I've read and studied about pretty
much came alive today from the artwork to the depth and intellect
these men have in their '60s. They're still sharp."
Porter said he would like to see more events of this nature at the
University and hopes that next time there will be a larger venue.
Rob DiMatteo, a School of Arts and Sciences senior, had seen the
event advertised, heard his professor talking about it and wanted to
feed his interest in political terrorism and international law.
"I'm a senior now. I'm about to graduate. I just feel like these kind
of lectures and events are important," he said. "I skipped class to
come today."
School of Arts and Sciences senior Courtney Sample had studied the
Black Panthers in class and came out to see what she had read about in person.
"It's so important, and it's so pivotal in our society," she said. "A
lot of the programs that we know today, like the free lunch program
the government supports now, originated in the Black Panther Party.
It was seen as a militant organization, but that militancy only
lasted seven months. The rest was based on community-service-oriented
programs."
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